The Zombies – Odessey And Oracle (1968) – Full Stereo Remix

A little history, shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia:

Rod Argent and Chris White mixed the album down into mono, but when they delivered the master to CBS, they were informed that a stereo mix was required. The recording budget having been spent, Argent and White used their own money to pay for the stereo mix. One major problem arose when it came time to mix “This Will Be Our Year” into stereo. Record producer Ken Jones had dubbed live horn parts directly onto the mono mix. With the horns not having been recorded on the multi-track beforehand, a “re-channeled” stereo mix had to be made of the mono master of this track. The stereo album mix was completed on 1 January 1968.

My Comments:

The easiest way for me to start this post is: “If Chris White would let someone have the master multi-track tapes for 3 hours… this project wouldn’t have been necessary”. You see, Chris has all the multi-tracks. He’s held tightly to them since 1968.  Over the years, the original mixdown tape has been used for “remasters”… with results that I, frankly, have never liked… because the mixdown, itself… always sounded marred, and by the time companies like Rhino Records got ahold of it… there were dropouts in several tracks (“Maybe After He’s Gone”, “Changes”). The mixdown was also either extremely compressed or recorded at a very high level. The EMI sessions used the same Studer four track machine used on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The tracks that were done at Olympic Studios were recorded on Ampex tape machines – a pair of 4-tracks, a single 2-track, and a 1-track for mono mixdowns, which is why “Beechwood Park”, “Maybe After He’s Gone” and “I Want Her, She Wants Me” has a higher noise level (HISSSSSSSSSSSSSS!) than their Studer counterparts, which were considerably more quiet.

My Remix:

For the bulk of the material… I used RipX DeepRemix, iZotope RX 9 and 10, Dynamic Decompression by Divergent Audio, Adobe Audition and Spectral Recovery Systems (SRS).  On many of the tracks, much of the instruments were in mono, while the vocals and perhaps Mellotron were in the stereo spectrum very clearly. This is a telltale sign that there were quite a few bouncedowns or “reductions” in order to free up additional tracks. Another indication would be the signal-to-noise ratio, which was incredibly bad.  So the whole idea was to separate all the instruments into stems, clean and re-equalize them as much as possible and create a mix that had more depth.

Track Listing

1. “Care of Cell 44”
2. “A Rose for Emily”
3. “Maybe After He’s Gone”
4. “Beechwood Park”
5. “Brief Candles”
6. “Hung Up on a Dream”
7. “Changes”
8. “I Want Her, She Wants Me”
9. “This Will Be Our Year”
10. “Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914)”
11. “Friends of Mine”
12. “Time of the Season”
Total length: 35:18

Downloads:

MP3

FLAC